Text©1984,2007byAudreLordeAllrightsreserved.P.docx

Text © 1984, 2007 by Audre Lorde
All rights reserved. Published in the United States
by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division
of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com
Crossing Press and the Crossing Press colophon
are registered trademarks of Random House,
Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lorde, Audre.
Sister outsider.
(The Crossing Press
feminist series)
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3562.ʼ75S5 1984 814ʼ.54 84–1844
eISBN: 978-0-307-80904-9
v3.1
http://www.tenspeed.com
http://www.crownpublishing.com

Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger*
Where does the pain go when it goes away?**
EVERY BLACK WOMAN in America lives her
life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient
and
unexpressed angers.
My Black womanʼs anger is a molten pond at
the core of me, my most fiercely guarded
secret. I know how much of my life as a
powerful feeling woman is laced through
with this
net of rage. It is an electric thread woven
into every emotional tapestry upon which I
set the
essentials of my life — a boiling hot spring
likely to eruptat any point, leaping out of
my
consciousness like a fire on the landscape. How to
train that anger with accuracy rather than
deny it has been one of the major tasksof my
life.
Other Black women are not the root cause
nor the source of that pool of anger. I
know this,
no matter what the particular situation may be
between me and another Black woman at
the
moment. Then why does that anger unleash
itself most tellingly against another Black
woman at the least excuse? Why do I judge
her in a more critical light than any
other,
becoming enraged when she does not measure up?
And if behind the object of my attack should

lie the face of my own self, unaccepted, then
what could possibly quench a fire fueled by
such reciprocating passions?
When I started to writeabout the intensity of
the angers between Black women, I found
I had
only begun to touch one tip of a three-
pronged iceberg, the deepest understructure of which
was Hatred, that societal deathwish directed against us
from the moment we were born Black
and female in America. From that moment on
we have been steeped in hatred — for
our
color, for our sex, for our effrontery in daring
to presume we had any right to live. As
children we absorbed that hatred, passed it through
ourselves, and for the most part, we still
live our lives outside of the recognition of
what that hatred really is and how it
functions.
Echoes of it return as cruelty and anger in
our dealings with each other. For each of us
bears
the face that hatred seeks, and we have each learned
to be at home with cruelty because we
have survived so much of it within our own
lives.
Before I can writeabout Black womenʼs anger,
I must writeabout the poisonous seepage of
hatred that fuels that anger, and of the cruelty
that is spawned when they meet.
I have found this out by scrutinizing my
own expectations of other Black women, by
following the threads of my own rage at
Blackwomanness back into the hatred and

despisal
that embroidered my life with fire long before I
knew where that hatred camefrom, or
why
it was being heaped upon me. Children know
only themselves as reasons for the happenings
in their lives. So of course as a childI
decided theremust be somethingterribly wrong
with
me that inspired such contempt. The bus driver didnʼt
look at otherpeople like that. All the
things my mother had warned me not to do
and be that I had gone right ahead and done
and
been must be to blame.
To search for power within myself means I
must be willing to move through being
afraid to
whatever lies beyond. If I look at my most
vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I
have felt, I can remove the source of that pain
from my enemiesʼ arsenals. My history cannot
be used to feather my enemiesʼ arrows then, and
that lessens their power over me. Nothing I
accept about myself can be used against me to
diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I
came to do, acting upon you like a drug or
a chisel to remind you of your me-
ness, as I
discover you in myself.
Americaʼs measurement of me has lain like a barrier
across the realization of my own

powers. It was a barrier which I had to
examine and dismantle, piece by painful
piece, in
order to use my energies fully and creatively.
It is easier to deal with the external
manifestations of racism and sexism than it is to
deal with the results of those distortions
internalized within our consciousness of ourselves
and one another.
But what is the nature of that reluctanceto connect
with each otheron any but the most
superficial levels? What is the source of
that mistrust and distance maintained between
Black
women?
I donʼt like to talk about hate. I donʼt
like to remember the cancellation and hatred,
heavy as
my wished-for death, seen in the eyes of so
many white people from the time I could
see. It
was echoed in newspapers and movies and holy
pictures and comic books and Amos ʼn
Andy
radioprograms. I had no tools to dissect it, no
language to name it.
The AA subway train to Harlem. I clutch
my motherʼs sleeve, her arms full of
shopping
bags, christmas-heavy. The wet smell of winter
clothes, the trainʼs lurching. My mother spots
an almost seat, pushes my little snowsuited body
down. On one side of me a man reading a

paper. On the other, a woman in a fur
hat staring at me. Her mouth twitches as
she stares
and then her gaze drops down, pulling mine with it.
Her leather-gloved hand plucks at the
line where my new blue snowpants and her sleek
fur coat meet. She jerks her coat closer to
her. I look. I do not see whatever terrible
thing she is seeing on the seat between us —
probably a roach. But she has communicated her
horror to me. It must be something very
bad from the way sheʼslooking, so I pull my
snowsuit closer to me awayfrom it, too. When
I
look up the woman is still staring at me, her
nose holes and eyes huge. And suddenly I
realize
thereis nothing crawling up the seat between us; it
is me she doesnʼt want her coat to touch.
The fur brushes past my face as she stands with a
shudder and holds on to a strap in
the
speeding train. Born and bred a New York City child,
I quickly slide over to make roomfor
my mother to sit down. No word has been spoken.
Iʼm afraid to say anything to my mother
because I donʼt know what Iʼve done. I
look at the sidesof my snowpants, secretly. Is
there
somethingon them? Somethingʼs going on here I
do not understand, but I will never forget
it. Her eyes.The flared nostrils. The hate.
My three-year-old eyes ache from the machinery used to
test them. My forehead is sore. I
have been poked and prodded in the eyes and stared

into all morning. I huddle into the tall
metal and leather chair, frightenedand miserable
and wanting my mother. On the otherside
of the eye clinicʼs examining room, a group
of young white men in white coatsdiscuss
my
peculiar eyes.Only one voice remains in my
memory. “From the looks of her sheʼs
probably
simple, too.” They all laugh. One of them
comes over to me, enunciating slowly and
carefully, “OK, girlie, go wait outside now.”
He pats me on the cheek. I am grateful
for the
absence of harshness.
The Story Hour librarian reading Little Black
Sambo. Her white fingers holdup the little
book about a shoebutton-faced little boy with big
red lips and many pigtails and a hatful of
butter. I remember the pictures hurting me and
my thinking again theremust be something
wrong with me because everybody else is
laughing and besides the library downtown has
given this little book a special prize, the library
lady tells us.
SO WHATʼS WRONG WITH YOU, ANYWAY?
DONʼT BE SO SENSITIVE!
Sixth grade in a new catholic school and I
am the first Black student. The white girls
laugh
at my braided hair. The nun sends a note home
to my mother saying that “pigtails are not
appropriate attire for school,” and that I should
learnto comb my hair in “a more becoming

style.”
Lexie Goldman and I on Lexington Avenue, our
adolescent faces flushed from springtime
and our dash out of high school. We stop at a
luncheonette, ask for water. The woman
behind the counter smiles at Lexie. Gives us
water. Lexieʼs in a glass. Minein a
paper cup.
Afterward we joke about mine being portable. Too
loudly.
My first interview for a part-time job after school.
An optical company on Nassau Street
has called my school and asked for one of its
students. The man behind the counter reads
my
application and then looks up at me, surprised by
my Black face. His eyes remind me of the
woman on the train when I was five. Then
somethingelse is added, as he looks me up
and
down, pausing at my breasts.
My light-skinned mother kept me alive within an
environment where my life was not a high
priority. She used whatever methods she had at hand,
few as they were. She never talked
about color. My mother was a very brave
woman, born in the West Indies, unprepared
for
america. And she disarmed me with her silences.
Somewhere I knew it was a lie that
nobody

else noticed color. Me, darker than my two sisters.
My father, darkest of all. I was always
jealous of my sisters because my mother thought
they were such good girls, whereas I was
bad, always in trouble. “Full of the devil,”
she used to say. They were neat, I was untidy.
They were quiet, I was noisy. They were well-
behaved, I was rowdy. They took piano lessons
and won prizes in deportment. I stole money
from my fatherʼs pockets and broke my ankle
sledding downhill. They were good-looking, I
was dark. Bad, mischievous, a born
troublemaker if ever therewas one.
Did bad mean Black? The endless scrubbing with
lemon juice in the cracks and crevices of
my ripening, darkening, body. And oh, the sins of
my dark elbows and knees, my gums and
nipples, the foldsof my neck and the cave of my
armpits!
The hands that grab at me from behind the
stairwell are Black hands. Boysʼ hands,
punching, rubbing, pinching, pulling at my dress. I
hurl the garbage bag Iʼm carrying into the
ashcan and jerk away, fleeing back upstairs. Hoots
follow me. “Thatʼs right, you better run,
you ugly yaller bitch, just wait!” Obviously,
colorwas relative.
My mother taught me to survive from a very
earlyage by her own example. Her silences
also taught me isolation, fury, mistrust, self-
rejection, and sadness. My survival lay in
learning how to use the weapons she gave me,
also, to fight against those things within

myself, unnamed.
And survival is the greatest gift of love.
Sometimes, for Black mothers, it is the
only gift
possible, and tenderness gets lost. My mother bore
me into life as if etching an angry
message
into marble. Yet I survived the hatred around
me because my mother made me know,
by
oblique reference, that no matter what went on at
home, outside shouldnʼt oughta be the
way it was. But since it was that way outside, I
moved in a fen of unexplained anger
that
encircled me and spilled out against whomeverwas
closest that shared those hated selves. Of
course I did not realize it at the time.That
anger lay like a pool of acid deep inside
me, and
whenever I felt deeply, I felt it, attaching itself
in the strangest places. Upon those as
powerless as I. My first friend asking, “Why do
you go around hitting all the time? Is
that the
only way you know how to be friends?
What othercreature in the world besides the
Black woman has had to buildthe knowledge
of
so much hatred into her survival and keep going?
It is shortly after the CivilWar. In a grey stone
hospital on 110th Street in New York City a
woman is screaming. She is Black, and

healthy, and has been brought here from the South.
I
do not know her name. Her baby is ready to
be born. But her legs have been tied together
out of a curiosity masquerading as science. Her
baby births itselfto death against her bone.
Where are you seven-year-old Elizabeth Eckford of
Little Rock, Arkansas? It is a bright
Monday morning and you are on your way to
your first day of school, draped in spittle,
white hatred running down your pink sweater
and a white motherʼs twisted mouth
working
— savage, inhuman — wide over your jaunty braids
held high by their pink ribbons.
Numvulo has walked five days from the bleak
place where the lorry deposited her. She
stands in the Capetown, South Africa rain,
her bare feet in the bulldozer tracks where
her
house once was. She picks up a piece of
soaked cardboard that once covered her table and
holds it over the head of her baby strapped to
her back. Soonshe will be arrested and taken
back to the reserve, where she does not even
speak the language. She will never get
permission to live near her husband.
The bicentennial, in Washington, D.C. Two ample
Black women stand guard over
household belonging piledhaphazardly onto a sidewalk in
front of a house. Furniture, toys,
bundles of clothes. One woman absently rocks a
toy horse with the toe of her shoe, back

and
forth. Across the street on the side of a
building opposite is a sign painted in story-
high black
letters, GODHATES YOU.
Addie Mae Collins, Carol Robertson, Cynthia
Wesley, Denise McNair. Four little Black girls,
none more than ten years of age, singing their last
autumn song in a Sunday church school in
Birmingham, Alabama. After the explosion clears
it is not possible to tell which patent
leather Sunday shoe belongs to which found
leg.
What otherhuman being absorbs so much
virulent hostility and still functions?
Black women have a history of the use and
sharing of power, from the Amazon legions
of
Dahomey through the Ashanti warrior queen Yaa
Asantewaa and the freedom fighter Harriet
Tubman, to the economically powerful market-women
guilds of present West Africa. We have
a tradition of closeness and mutual care and
support, from the all-woman courts of the
Queen
Mothers of Benin to the present-day Sisterhood
of the Good Death, a community of
old
women in Brazil who, as escaped slaves,
provided escape and refuge for other enslaved
women, and who now care for each other.*
We are Black women born into a society of
entrenched loathing and contempt for whatever
is Black and female. We are strong and

enduring. We are also deeply scarred. As African
women together, we once made the earth fertile
with our fingers. We can make the earth
bear as well as mount the first line of fire in
defense of the King. And having killed, in
his
name and in our own (Harrietʼs rifle speaks,
shouldered in the grim marsh), we still know
that the power to kill is less than the power to
create, for it produces an ending rather
than
the beginning of somethingnew.
Anger — a passion of displeasure that may be
excessive or misplaced but not necessarily
harmful. Hatred — an emotional habitor attitude of
mind in which aversion is coupled with
ill will. Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred
does.
Racism and sexism are grown-up words. Black
children in america cannot avoid these
distortions in their living and, too often, do
not have the words for naming them. But
both
are correctly perceived as hatred.
Growing up, metabolizing hatred like a daily
bread. Because I am Black, because I am
woman, because I am not Black enough,
because I am not some particular fantasy of
a
woman, because I AM. On such a consistent
diet, one can eventually come to value
the
hatred of oneʼs enemies more than one values
the love of friends, for that hatred becomes
the
source of anger, and anger is a powerful

fuel.
And true, sometimes it seems that anger alone
keeps me alive; it burns with a bright
and
undiminished flame. Yet anger, like guilt, is an
incomplete form of human knowledge. More
useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is
useful to help clarify our differences, but in
the
long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is
a blindforcewhich cannot create the future.
It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not
focus upon what lies ahead, but upon
what lies behind, upon what created it — hatred.
And hatred is a deathwish for the hated,
not a lifewish for anything else.
To grow up metabolizing hatred like daily
bread means that eventually every human
interaction becomes tainted with the negative
passion and intensity of its by-products —
anger and cruelty.
We are African women and we know, in our
bloodʼs telling, the tenderness with which
our
foremothers held each other. It is that connection
which we are seeking. We have the stories
of Black women who healed each otherʼs
wounds, raised each otherʼs children, fought
each
otherʼs battles, tilled each otherʼs earth, and
eased each otherʼs passages into life and into
death. We know the possibilities of support
and connection for which we all yearn,

and about
which we dream so often. We have a
growing Black womenʼs literature which is richly
evocative of these possibilities and connections.
But connections between Black women are
not automatic by virtue of our similarities, and
the possibilities of genuine communication
between us are not easily achieved.
Often we give lip service to the idea of mutual
support and connection between Black
women because we have not yet crossed the barriers
to thesepossibilities, nor fully explored
the angers and fears that keep us from realizing the
power of a real Black sisterhood. And to
acknowledge our dreams is to sometimes
acknowledge the distance between those dreams
and our present situation. Acknowledged,our dreams
can shape the realities of our future, if
we arm them with the hard work and scrutiny of now.
We cannot settle for the pretenses of
connection, or for parodies of self-love. We cannot
continue to evade each other on the
deepest levels because we fear each otherʼs
angers, nor continue to believe that respect
means never looking directly nor with openness
into another Black womanʼs eyes.
I was not meant to be alone and without
you who understand.*
I.
I know the anger that lies inside of me
like I know the beat of my heartand the
taste of my

spit. It is easier to be angry than to hurt.
Anger is what I do best. It is easier to
be furious
than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in
you than to take on the threatening universe
of whiteness by admitting that we are worth
wanting each other.
As Black women, we have shared so many
similar experiences. Why doesnʼt this
commonality bring us closer together instead of
setting us at each otherʼs throats with
weapons well-honed by familiarity?
The anger with which I meet another Black
womanʼs slightest deviation from my
immediate need or desire or concept of a
proper response is a deep and hurtful anger,
chosen
only in the sense of a choice of desperation
— reckless through despair. That anger which
masks my pain that we are so separate who should
most be together — my pain — that she
could perhaps not need me as much as I
need her, or see me through the blunted eye of
the
haters, that eye I know so well from my own
distorted images of her. Erase or be erased!
I stand in the Public Library waiting to be
recognized by the Black woman library
clerk
seated a few feet behind the desk. She seems
engrossed in a book, beautiful in her youth
and
self-assuredness. I straighten my glasses, giving a

tiny shake to my bangles in the process
just
in case she has not seen me, but I somehow know
she has. Otherwise motionless, she slowly
turnsher head and looks up. Her eyes crossmine with a
look of such incidental hostility that
I feel pilloried to the wall. Two male patrons enter
behind me. At that, she rises and moves
toward me. “Yes,” she says, with no inflection at
all, her eyes carefully elsewhere. Iʼve never
seen this young woman before in my life. I
think to myself, “now thatʼs what you call an
attitude,” recognizing the rising tension inside of
me.
The art, beyond insolence, of the Black girlʼs
face as she cuts her elegant sidelong glance at
me. What makes her eyes slide off of mine?
What does she see that angers her so, or
infuriates her, or disgusts her? Why do I want to
break her face off when her eyes do not
meet mine? Why does she wear my sisterʼs face?
My daughterʼs mouth turned down about
to
suck itselfin? The eyes of a furious and rejected
lover? Why do I dream I cradle you at
night?
Divide your limbs between the food bowls of
my least favorite animals? Keepvigil for you
nightafter terrible night, wondering? Oh sister,
where is that dark rich land we wanted to
wander through together?
Hate said the voice wired in 3/4 time printed in
dirty type all the views fit to kill, me and
you,

me or you. And whose future image have we
destroyed — your face or mine — without either
how
shall I look again at both — lacking either is
lacking myself.
And if I trust you what pale dragon will you feed
our brown flesh to from fear, self-preservation,
or to what brothered altar all innocent of loving
that has no place to go and so becomes
another
face of terror or of hate?
A dumb beastendlessly recording inside the
poisonous attacks of silence — meat gone wrong
—
what could ever growin that dim lair and how does
the childconvert from sacrifice to liar?
My blood sister, across her living room
from me. Sitting back in her chair while I
talk
earnestly, trying to reach her, trying to alter
the perceptions of me that cause her so
much
pain. Slowly, carefully, and coldly, so I will not
miss one single scathing word, she says, “I
am not interested in understanding whatever youʼre
trying to say — I donʼt care to hear
it.”
I have never gotten over the anger that you
did not want me as a sister, nor an ally,
nor
even a diversion one cut above the cat. You have
never gotten over the anger that I

appeared
at all. And that I am different, but not different
enough. One woman has eyes like my sister
who never forgave me for appearing before she
had a chance to win her motherʼs love, as if
anybody ever could. Another woman wears the
high cheekbones of my other sister who
wanted to lead but had only been taught to
obey, so now she is dedicated to ruling by
obedience, a passive vision.
Who did we expect the otherto be who is not
yet at peace with our own selves? I cannot
shut you out the way I shut the others out so
maybe I can destroy you. Mustdestroy you?
We do not love ourselves, therefore we cannot love
each other. Because we see in each
otherʼs face our own face, the face we never
stopped wanting. Because we survived and
survival breeds desire for more self. A face we
never stopped wanting at the same time as
we
try to obliterate it.
Why donʼt we meet each otherʼs eyes? Do
we expect betrayal in each otherʼs gaze, or
recognition?
If just once we were to feel the pain of all Black
womenʼs blood flooding up to drown us! I
stayed afloat buoyed by an anger so deep at
my loneliness that I could only move

toward
further survival.
When one cannot influence a situation it is an
act of wisdom to withdraw.*
Every Black woman in america has survived
several lifetimes of hatred, where even in
the
candy store cases of our childhood, little brown
niggerbaby candies testified against us. We
survived the wind-driven spittle on our childʼs
shoe and pink flesh-colored bandaids,
attempted rapes on rooftops and the prodding fingers
of the superʼs boy, seeing our
girlfriends blown to bits in Sunday School,
and we absorbed that loathing as a natural
state.
We had to metabolize such hatred that our cells
have learned to live upon it because we had
to, or die of it. Old King Mithridates learned to
eat arsenic bit by bit and so outwitted his
poisoners, but Iʼd have hated to kiss him upon
his lips! Now we deny such hatred
ever
existed because we have learned to neutralize it
through ourselves, and the catabolic process
throws off waste products of fury even when
we love.
I see hatred
I am bathed in it, drowning in it
sincealmost the beginning of my life
it has been the air I breathe
the food I eat, the content of my perceptions;
the single most constant fact of my existence
is their hatred …

I am too young for my history**
It is not that Black women shed each
otherʼs psychic blood so easily, but that we
have
ourselves bled so often, the pain of bloodshed
becomes almost commonplace. If I have
learned to eat my own flesh in the forest —
starving, keening, learning the lesson of the
she-
wolf who chews off her own paw to leave the
trap behind — if I must drink my own
blood,
thirsting, why should I stop at yours until your
dear dead arms hang like withered garlands
upon my breast and I weepfor your going, oh
my sister, I grieve for our gone.
When an error of oversight allows one of us to
escape without the full protective dose of
fury and air of contemptuous disdain, when she
approaches us without a measure of distrust
and reserve flowing from her pores, or without
her eyes coloring each appraisal of us with
that unrelenting sharpness and suspicion reserved only
for each other, when she approaches
without sufficient caution, then she is cursed by
the first accusation of derision — naive —
meaning not programmed for defensive attack before
inquiry. Even more than confused, naive
is the ultimate wipeout between us.
Black women eating our own hearts out for
nourishment in an empty house empty

compoundempty city in an empty season, and
for each of us one year the spring will not
return — we learned to savor the taste of
our own flesh before any otherbecause that was all
that was allowed us. And we have become to
each other unmentionably dear and
immeasurably dangerous. I am writing about an
anger so huge and implacable, so corrosive,
it must destroy what it most needs for its own
solution, dissolution, resolution. Here we are
attempting to address each othersʼ eyes directly.
Even if our words taste sharp as the edge of
a lost womanʼs voice, we are speaking.
II
A Black woman, working her years, committed
to life as she lives it, the children fed
and
clothed and loved as she can into somestrength
that does not allow them to encyst like horse
chestnuts, knowing all the time from the start that
she must either kill them or eventually
send them into the deathlands, the white labyrinth.
I sat at our Thanksgiving Day table listening to
my daughter talk about the university and
the horrors of determined invisibility. Over the
years I have recorded her dreams of death
at
their hands, sometimes glorious, sometimes cheap.
She tells me of the teachers who refuse to
understand simple questions, who look at her as if

she were a benign — meaning powerless
— but unsightly tumor. She weeps. I hold her. I
tell her to remember the university doesnʼt
own her, that she has a home. But I have let
her go into that jungle of ghosts, having
taught
her only how to be fleet of foot, how to whistle,
how to love, and how not to run. Unless she
has to. It is never enough.
Black women give our children forth into a hatred
that seared our own young days with
bewilderment, hoping we have taught them something
they can use to fashion their own new
and less costly pathways to survival. Knowing I
did not slit their throats at birth tear out the
tiny beating heartwith my own despairing teeth the
way somesisters did in the slaveships
chained to corpses and therefore was I committed
to this very moment.
The priceof increasingpower is increasingopposition.*
I sat listening to my girl talk about the bent
world she was determined to reenter in
spite
of all she was saying, because she views a
knowledge of that world as part of an arsenal
which she can use to change it all. I
listened, hiding my pained need to snatch
her back into
the web of my smaller protections. I sat
watching while she worked it out bit by
hurtful bit
— what she really wanted — feeling her
rage wax and wane, feeling her anger building
against me because I could not help her do it

nor do it for her, nor would she allow
that.
All mothers see their daughters leaving. Black
mothers see it happening as a sacrifice
through the veil of hatred hung like sheets of
lava in the pathway before their daughters.
All
daughters see their mothers leaving. Black girls see it
happeningthrough a veil of threatened
isolation no fire of trusting pierces.
Last month I held another Black woman in
my arms as she sobbed out the grief and
deprivation of her motherʼs death. Her
inconsolable loss — the emptiness of the emotional
landscape she was seeing in front of her —
spoke out of her mouth from a place of
untouchable aloneness that could never admit
another Black woman closeenough again to
matter. “The world is divided into two kinds of
people,” she said, “those who have mothers
and those who donʼt. And I donʼt have a
mother anymore.”What I heard her saying
was that
no otherBlack woman would ever see who she
was, ever trust or be trusted by her again. I
heard in her cry of loneliness the source of
the romance between Black women and our
mommas.
Little Black girls, tutored by hate into
wanting to become anything else. We cut our
eyes at
sister because she can only reflect what everybody
else except momma seemed to know —

that we were hateful, or ugly,or worthless,but
certainly unblessed. We were not boys and
we were not white, so we counted for less than
nothing, except to our mommas.
If we can learn to give ourselves the recognition
and acceptance that we have come to
expect only from our mommas, Black women
will be able to see each other much more
clearly and deal with each othermuch more directly.
I think about the harshness that exists
so often within the least encounter
between Black
women, the judgment and the sizing up, that cruel
refusal to connect. I know sometimes I
feel like it is worth my life to disagree with
another Black woman. Better to ignore her,
withdraw from her, go around her, just donʼt deal
with her. Not just because she irritates me,
but because she might destroy me with the cruel
forceof her response to what must feel like
an affront, namely me. Or I might destroy
her with the force of mine, for the very same
reason. The fears are equal.
OnceI can absorb the particulars of my life as
a Black woman, and multiply them by my
two children and all the days of our collective Black
lives, and I do not falter beneath the
weight — what Black woman is not a
celebration, like water, like sunlight, like rock —
is it

any wonder that my voice is harsh? Now to
require of myself the effort of awareness,
so that
harshness will not function in the places it is
least deserved — toward my sisters.
Why do Black women reserve a particular voice
of fury and disappointment for each other?
Who is it we must destroy when we attack
each otherwith that tone of predetermined and
correct annihilation? We reduce one another to
our own lowest common denominator, and
then we proceed to try and obliterate what we most
desire to love and touch, the problematic
self, unclaimedbut fiercely guarded from the other.
This cruelty between us, this harshness, is a
piece of the legacy of hate with which
we were
inoculated from the time we were born by those
who intended it to be an injection of death.
But we adapted, learned to take it in and use it,
unscrutinized. Yet at what cost! In order to
withstand the weather, we had to become stone,
and now we bruise ourselves upon the other
who is closest.
How do I alter course so each Black womanʼs
face I meet is not the face of my mother or
my killer?
I loved you. I dreamed about you. I talked
to you for hours in my sleepsitting under
a silk-cotton
tree our arms around each other or braiding each
otherʼs hair or oiling each otherʼs backs,

and
every time I run into you on the street or at
the post office or behind the Medicaid desk I
want to
wring your neck.
There are so many occasions in each of our
lives for righteous fury, multipliedand dividing.
• Black women being told that we can be
somehow better, and are worse, but never
equal.
To Black men. To otherwomen. To human beings.
• The white academic feminist who tells me she is
so glad This Bridge Called My Back*
exists, because now it gives her a chance to
deal with racism without having to face the
harshness of Black undiluted by other colors.
What she means is she does not have to
examine her own specific terror and loathing of
Blackness, nor deal with the angers of Black
women. So get awaywith your dirty ugly mean faces,
all screwed up all the time!
• The racist filmstrip artist who I thought I
had handled so patiently and well. I didnʼt
blow up his damned machine. I explained how his
racial blindness made me feel and how his
film could be altered to have somemeaning. He
probably learned somethingabout showing
Black images. Then I camehome and almost
tore up my house and my loverbecause some
invitations happened to be misprinted. Not seeing
where the charge of rage was born.
• A convicted Black man, a torturer of women

and children, army-trained to be a killer,
writes in his journal in his death cell:
“I am the type of person you are most likely to
find driving a Mercedes and sitting in the
executive offices of 100 big corporations.” And heʼs
right. Except heʼs Black.
How do we keep from releasing our angers at them
upon ourselves and each other? How
do I free myself from this poison I was force-
fed like a Strasburg goose until I vomited anger
at the least scent of anything nourishing, oh
my sister the belligerent lift of your
shoulder the
breath of your hair.… We each learned the craft of
destruction. It is all they knew to allow
us,
yet look how our words are finding each otheragain.
It is difficult to construct a wholesomenessmodel
when we are surrounded with synonyms
for filth. But not impossible. We have, after all,
survived for a reason. (How do I define
my
impact upon this earth?) I begin by searching
for the right questions.
Dear Leora,
For two Black women to enter an analytic or
therapeutic relationship means
beginning an essentially uncharted and insecure
journey. There are no prototypes, no

models, no objectively accessible body of experience
otherthan ourselves by which
to examine the specific dynamics of our interactions
as Black women. Yet this
interaction can affect all the other psychic
matter attended profoundly. It is to
scrutinize that very interaction that I sought you
out professionally, and I have come
to see that it means picking my way through
our similarities and our differences, as
well as through our histories of calculated mistrust
and desire.
Because it has not been done before or at
least not been noted, this particular
scrutiny is painful and fraught with the vulnerability
of all psychic scrutinies plus all
of the pitfalls created by our being Black
women in a white male world, and Black
women who have survived. This is a scrutiny
often sidestepped or considered
unimportant or beside the point. EXAMPLE: I
canʼt tell you how many good white
psychwomen have said to me, “Why should it
matter if I am Black or white?” who
would never thinkof saying, “Why does it
matter if I am female or male?”
EXAMPLE:
I donʼt know who you are in supervision
with, but I can bet itʼs not with another
Black woman.
So this territory between us feels new and
frightening as well as urgent, rigged
with detonating pieces of our own individual
racial histories which neither of us

chose but which each of us bears the scars
from. And those are particular to each of
us. But there is a history which we share
because we are Black women in a racist
sexist cauldron, and that means somepart of this
journey is yours, also.
I have many troubled areasof self that will be
neither new nor problematic to you
as a trained and capable psychperson. I think
you are a brave woman and I respect
that, yet I doubt that your training can have
prepared you to explore the tangle of
need, fear, distrust, despair, and hope which
operates between us, and certainly not
to the depth necessary. Because neither of us
is male nor white, we belong to a group
of human beings that has not been thought worthy
of that kind of study. So we have
only who we are, with or without the courage to
use those selves for further
exploration and clarification of how what lies
between us as Black women affects us
and the work we do together.
Yet if we do not do it here between us, each
one of us will have to do it somewhere
else, sometime.
I know thesethings: I do not yet know
what to do about them. But I do want to
make them fit together to serve my life and
my work, and I donʼt mean merely in
a
way that feels safe. I donʼt know how they can
further and illuminate your life and

work, but I know they can. It is sometimes
both the curse and the blessing of the poet
to perceive without yet being able to order
those perceptions, and that is another
name for Chaos.
But of course it is out of Chaos that new
worlds are born.
I look forward to our meeting eye to eye.
Audre
III
There has been so much death and loss around
me recently, without metaphor or redeeming
symbol, that sometimes I feel trapped into one
idiom only — that one of suffering and its
codicil, to bear. The same problem exists
with anger. I have processed too much of
it
recently, or else the machinery is slowing down
or becoming less efficient, and it creeps into
my most crucial interchanges.
Perhaps this is why it is ofteneasier for Black
women to interact with white women, even
though those interactions are oftena dead end
emotionally. For with white women thereis a
middle depth of interaction possible and
sustainable, an emotional limit to relationships
of
self upon self acknowledged.

Now why is this not so with Frances, who is white,
and whom I meet at a depth beyond
anyone? When I speak of Frances and me I
am talking about a relationship not only of
great
depth but one of great breadth also, a
totaling of differences without merging. I am
also
speaking of a love shaped by our mutual
commitment to hard work and confrontation over
many years, each of us refusing to settle
for what was easy, or simple, or
acceptably
convenient.
That middle depth of relationship more usually
possible between Black and white women,
however, is less threatening than the tangle of
unexplored needs and furies that face any
two
Black women who seek to engage each other
directly, emotionally, no matter what the
context of their relationship may be. This holds
true for office workers and political activists
as well as lovers. But it is through threading
this tangle that new visions of self and
possibility between Black women emerge. Again,
I am speaking here of social relationships,
for it is crucial that we examine dynamics
between women who are not lovers as well as
between women who are.
I ask myself, do I ever use my war against
racism to avoid othereven more unanswerable
pain? And if so, doesnʼt that make the energy

behind my battles against racism sometimes
more tenuous, or less clearheaded, or subject to
unexpected stresses and disappointments?
White people can never truly validate us. For
example: At this pointin time,were racism to
be totally eradicatedfrom those middle range
relationships between Black women and white
women, those relationships might become
deeper, but they would still never satisfy our
particular Black womanʼs need for one another, given
our shared knowledge and traditions
and history. There are two very different struggles
involved here. One is the war against
racism in white people, and the other is
the need for Black women to confront and
wade
through the racist constructs underlying our
deprivation of each other. And thesebattles
are
not at all the same.
But sometimes it feels like better a righteous
fury than the dull ache of loss, loss, loss. My
daughter leaving her time of daughterhood. Friends
going awayin one way or another.
… as those seemingly alike mature,
nature emphasizes their uniqueness and the
differences
become more obvious.*
How often have I demanded from
another Black woman what I had not dared
to give
myself — acceptance, faith, enough space to
consider change? How oftenhave I asked her to

leap across difference, suspicion, distrust, old pain?
How many times have I expected her to
jump the hideous gaps of our learned despisals
alone, like an animal trained through
blindness to ignore the precipice?How many times
have I forgotten to ask this question?
Am I not reaching out for you in the only
language I know? Are you reaching for me in
your only salvaged tongue? If I try to hear yours
across our differences does/will that mean
you can hear mine?
Do we explore thesequestions or do we settle
for that secret isolation which is the learned
tolerance of deprivation of each other— that
longing for each otherʼs laughter, dark ease,
sharing, and permission to be ourselves that we
do not admit to feeling, usually, because
then we would have to admit the lack; and the
pain of that lacking, persistent as a low-grade
feverand as debilitating?
Do we reenact these crucifixions upon each
other, the avoidance, the cruelty, the
judgments, because we have not been allowed Black
goddesses, Black heroines; because we
have not been allowed to see our mothers and our
selves in their/our own magnificence until
that magnificence became part of our blood and
bone? One of the functions of hatred is
certainly to maskand distort the beauty which is
power in ourselves.
I am hungry for Black women who will not
turn from me in anger and contempt even

before they know me or hear what I have to
say. I am hungry for Black women who
will not
turn awayfrom me even if they do not agree with
what I say. We are, after all, talking about
different combinations of the same borrowed sounds.
Sometimes exploring our differences feels like
marching out to war. I hurl myself with
trepidation into the orbit of every Black woman
I want to reach, advancing with the best of
what I have to offer held out at arms length before
me — myself. Does it feel different to
her? At the sametime as I am terrified, expecting
betrayal, rejection, the condemnations of
laughter, is she feeling judged by me?
Mostof the Black women I know thinkI
cry too much, or that Iʼm too public about
it. Iʼve
been told that crying makes me seem soft and
therefore of little consequence. As if our
softness has to be the pricewe pay out for power,
rather than simply the one thatʼs paid most
easily and most often.
I fight nightmare images inside my own
self, see them, own them, know they did not
destroy me before and will not destroy me now if
I speak them out, admit how they have
scarred me, that my mother taught me to survive
at the same time as she taught me to fear
my own Blackness. “Donʼt trust white people
because they mean us no good and donʼt
trust
anyone darker than you because their hearts are as
Black as their faces.” (And where did that
leave me, the darkest one?) It is painful
even now to writeit down. How many

messages like
that come down to all of us, and in how
many different voices, how many different
ways?
And how can we expunge these messages from
our consciousness without first recognizing
what it was they were saying, and how destructive
they were?
IV
What does it take to be tough? Learned
cruelty?
Now there is bound to be a voice saying
that Black women have always helped
one
another, havenʼt we? And that is the paradox of
our inner conflict. We have a strong and
ancient tradition of bonding and mutual support,
and the memorized threads of that tradition
exist within each of us, in opposition to the
anger and suspicion engendered by self-hate.
When the world moved against me with a
disapproving frown / It was sister put
the ground back
under my feet.*
Hearing those words sung has always provoked
the most profound and poignant sense of
loss within me for somethingI wanted to feel
and could not because it had never
happened

for me. There are someBlack women for whom
it has. For others of us, that sense of
being
able to depend upon rock bottom support from our
sisters is somethingwe dream about and
work toward, knowing it is possible, but also very
problematic across the realities of fear and
suspicion lyingbetween us.
Our anger, tempered over survival fires, shuttered
behind downcast eyelids, or else blazing
out of our eyes at the oddest times. Looking
up from between the legs of a lover, over a
notebook in the middle of a lecture and I
almost lost my train of thought, ringing up
groceries in the supermarket, filling out the form
behind the unemployment office window,
stepping out of a, cab in the middle of
Broadway on the arm of a businessman from
Lagos,
sweeping ahead of me into a shop as I open
the door, looking into each others eyes for a
split
second only — furious, cutting, sisters. My
daughter asking me all the time when she
was a
little girl, “Are you angry about something,
Mommy?”
As Black women, we have wasted our angers
too often, buried them, called them
someone
elseʼs, cast them wildly into oceans of racism
and sexism from which no vibration resounded,
hurled them into each otherʼs teeth and then ducked to
avoid the impact. But by and large,

we avoid open expression of them, or
cordon them off in a rigid and
unapproachable
politeness. The rage that feels illicit or
unjustified is kept secret, unnamed, and preserved
forever. We are stuffed with furies, against
ourselves, against each other, terrified to
examine
them lest we find ourselves in bold print fingered and
named what we have always felt and
even sometimes preferred ourselves to be — alone.
And certainly, thereare enough occasions
in all our lives where we can use our anger
righteously, enough for many lifetimes. We
can
avoid confrontation with each othervery readily. It is
so much easier to examine our anger
within situations that are (relatively) clearcut and
emotionally unloaded. It is so much easier
to express our anger in those middle depth
relationships that do not threaten genuine self-
exposure. And yet always that hunger for the
substance known, a hunger for the real shared,
for the sister who shares.
It is hard to stand up in the teeth of white
dismissal and aggression, of gender hatred
and
attack. It is so much harder to tackle
face-on the rejection of Black women who may
be
seeing in my face someface they have not discarded in
their own mirror, who see in my eyes
the shape they have come to fear may be
their own. So often this fear is stoked
between

Black women by the feared loss of a male
companion, present or sought after. For
we have
also been taught that a man acquired was the sole
measure of success, and yet they almost
never stay.
One Black woman sits and silently judges
another, how she looks, how she acts, how she
impresses others. The first womanʼs scales are
weighted against herself. She is measuringthe
impossible. She is measuring the self she does not
fully want to be. She does not want to
accept the contradictions, nor the beauty. She wishes
the otherwoman would go away. She
wishes the other woman would become
someone else, anyone other than another Black
woman. She has enough trouble dealing with being
herself. “Why donʼt you learn to fly
straight,” she says to the otherwoman. “Donʼt you
understand what your poor showing says
about us all? If I could fly Iʼd certainly do
a better job than that.Canʼt you put on a
more
together show? The white girls do it. Maybe
we could get one to showyou how.” The
other
woman cannot speak. She is too busy keeping
herself from crashing upon the ground. She
will not cry the tears which are hardening into little
sharp stones that spit from her eyes and
implant themselves in the first womanʼs heart,
who quickly healsover them and identifies

them as the source of her pain.
V
There are myths of self-protection that hold us
separate from each otherand breed harshness
and cruelty where we most need softness and
understanding.
1. That courtesy or politeness require our not
noticing each otherdirectly, only with the
most covert of evaluating glances. At all costs,
we must avoid the image of our fear. “How
beautiful your mouth is” might well be heard
as “Look at those big lips.” We
maintain a
discreet distance between each otheralso because that
distance between us makes me less
you, makes you less me.
When thereis no connection at all between
people, then anger is a way of bringing
them
closer together, of making contact. But when
there is a greatdeal of connectedness that is
problematic or threatening or unacknowledged,
then anger is a way of keeping people
separate, of putting distance between us.
2. That because we sometimes rise to each
otherʼs defense against outsiders, we do
not
need to look at devaluation and dismissal among
ourselves. Support against outsiders is very

different from cherishing each other. Often it is
a case of “like needs like.” It doesnʼt
mean we
have to appreciate that like or our need of
it, even when that like is the only thin line
between dying and living.
For if I take the white worldʼs estimation of
me as Black-woman-synonymous-with-garbage
to heart, then deep down inside myself I
will always believe that I am truly good for
nothing.
But it is veryhard to lookabsorbed hatred in
the face. It is easier to see you as good
for
nothing because you are like me. So when you
support me because you are like me, that
merely confirms that you are nothing too, just like
me. Itʼs a no-win position, a case of
nothing supporting nothing and someoneʼs gonna
have to pay for that one, and it sure ainʼt
gonna be me! When I can recognize my worth,
I can recognize yours.
3. That perfection is possible, a correct expectation
from ourselves and each other, and the
only terms of acceptance, humanness. (Note
how very useful that makes us to the
external
institutions!) If you are like me, then you will have to
be a lot better than I am in order to
even be good enough. And you canʼtbe because no
matter how good you are youʼre still a
Black woman, just like me. (Who does she
think she is?) So any act or idea that I could
accept or at least examine from anyone else is

not even tolerable if it comes from you, my
mirror image. If you are not THEIR image of
perfection, and you canʼtever be because you
are a Black woman, then you are a reflection
upon me. We are never good enough for each
other. All your faults become magnified
reflections of my own threatening inadequacies. I
must attack you first before our enemies confuse us
with each other. But they will anyway.
Oh mother, why were we armed to fight with cloud-
wreathed swords and javelins of dust? “Just
who do you thinkyou are, anyway?” Who I am most
afraid of (never) meeting.
VI
The language by which we have been taught to
dismiss ourselves and our feelings as suspect
is the same language we use to dismiss and suspect
each other. Too pretty — too ugly.Too
Black — too white. Wrong. I already know
that. Who says so. Youʼre too questionable for
me
to hear you. You speak THEIR language. You donʼt
speak THEIR language. Who do you think
you are? You thinkyouʼre better than anybody else?
Get out of my face.
We refuse to give up the artificial distances
between us, or to examine our real differences
for creative exchange. Iʼm too different for us to
communicate. Meaning, I must establish
myself as not-you. And the road to anger is
paved with our unexpressed fear of each otherʼs

judgment. We have not been allowed to
experience each other freely as Black
women in
america; we come to each other coated in
myths, stereotypes, and expectations from
the
outside, definitions not our own. “You are my
reference group, but I have never worked
with
you.” How are you judging me? As Black as
you? Blacker than you? Not Black
enough?
Whichever, I am going to be found
wanting in someway …
We are Black women, defined as never-good-
enough. I must overcome that by becoming
better than you. If I expect enough from
myself, then maybe I can become different
from
what they say we are, different from you. If I become
different enough, then maybe I wonʼt
be a “nigger bitch” anymore. If I make
you different enough from me, then I wonʼt
need you
so much. I will become strong, the best, excel
in everything, become the very best because I
donʼt dare to be anything else. It is my
only chance to become good enough to
become
human.
If I am myself, then you cannot accept me.
But if you can accept me, that means I
am what
you would like to be, and then Iʼm not “the real
thing.” But then neither are you. WILL THE
REAL BLACK WOMAN PLEASE STAND UP?

We cherish our guilty secret, buried under
exquisite clothing and expensive makeup and
bleaching creams (yes, still!) and hair straighteners
masquerading as permanent waves. The
killer instinct toward any one of us who
deviates from the proscribed cover is
precise and
deadly.
Acting like an insider and feeling like the
outsider, preserving our self-rejection as Black
women at the same time as weʼre getting over —
we think. And political work will not save
our souls, no matter how correct and necessary
that work is. Yet it is true that without
political work we cannot hope to survive
long enough to effect any change. And self-
empowerment is the most deeply political work thereis,
and the most difficult.
When we do not attempt to name the
confusion of feelings which exist between sisters,
we
act them out in hundreds of hurtful and
unproductive ways. Never speaking from the
old
pain, to beyond. As if we have made a secret
pact between ourselves not to speak, for the
expression of that unexamined pain might be
accompanied by otherancient and unexpressed
hurtings embedded in the stored-up anger we
have not expressed. And that anger, as we
know from our flayed egos of childhood,
is armed with a powerful cruelty learned in
the
bleakness of too-early battles for survival. “You
canʼttake it, huh!” The Dozens. A Black
game

of supposedly friendly rivalry and name-calling; in
reality, a crucial exercise in learning how
to absorb verbal abuse without faltering.
A piece of the price we paid for learning
survival was our childhood. We were never
allowed to be children. It is the right of
children to be able to play at living for a
little while,
but for a Black child, every act can have
deadly serious consequences, and for a Black
girl
child, even more so. Ask the ghosts of the four
little Black girls blown up in Birmingham.
Ask
Angel Lenair, or Latonya Wilson, or Cynthia
Montgomery, the three girl victims in the
infamous Atlanta murders, none of whose deaths
have ever been solved.
Sometimes it feels as if I were to
experience all the collective hatred that I
have had
directed at me as a Black woman, admit its
implications into my consciousness, I might
die of
the bleak and horrible weight. Is that why a
sister once said to me, “white people feel,
Black
people do”?
It is true that in america white people, by
and large, have more time and space to afford
the luxury of scrutinizing their emotions.
Black people in this country have always

had to
attend closely to the hard and continuous work
of survival in the most material and
immediate planes. But it is a temptation to
move from this fact to the belief that Black
people
do not need to examine our feelings; or that they
are unimportant, sincethey have so often
been used to stereotypeand infantalize us; or that
thesefeelings are not vital to our survival;
or, worse, that thereis someacquired virtue in
not feeling them deeply. That is carrying a
timebomb wired to our emotions.
There is a distinction I am beginning to
make in my living between pain and
suffering. Pain
is an event, an experience that must be
recognized, named, and then used in someway in
order for the experience to change, to be
transformed into something else, strength or
knowledge or action.
Suffering, on the otherhand, is the nightmare reliving
of unscrutinized and unmetabolized
pain. When I live through pain without recognizing
it, self-consciously, I rob myself of the
power that can come from using that pain,
the power to fuel some movementbeyond it. I
condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over
and over whenever something close
triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly
inescapable cycle.
And true, experiencing old pain sometimes feels
like hurling myself full force against a

concrete wall. But I remind myself that I HAVE
LIVED THROUGH IT ALL ALREADY, AND
SURVIVED.
Sometimes the anger that lies between Black
women is not examined because we spend so
much of our substance having to examine
others constantly in the name of self-
protection
and survival, and we cannot reserve enough energy
to scrutinize ourselves. Sometimes we
donʼt do it because the angerʼs been thereso
long we donʼt know what it is, or we
thinkitʼs
natural to suffer rather than to experience
pain. Sometimes, because we are afraid of
what
we will find. Sometimes, because we donʼt think
we deserve it.
The revulsion on the womanʼs face in the subway as
she moves her coat awayand I think
she is seeing a roach. But I see the hatred
in her eyes because she wants me to see
the hatred
in her eyes,because she wants me to know in
only the way a childcan know that I donʼt
belong alive in her world. If Iʼd been grown,
Iʼd probably have laughed or snarled or been
hurt, seen it for what it was. But I am five years
old. I see it, I record it, I do not
name it, so
the experience is incomplete. It is not pain;it
becomes suffering.
And how can I tell you I donʼt like the way
you cut your eyes at me if I know that I

am
going to release all the unnamed angers within
you spawned by the hatred you have suffered
and never felt?
So we are drawn to each otherbut wary,
demanding the instant perfection we would
never
expect from our enemies. But it is possible to
break through this inherited agony, to refuse
acquiescence in this bitter charade of isolation
and anger and pain.
I read this question many times in the letters
of Black women, “Why do I feel myself
to be
such an anathema, so isolated?” I hear it spoken
over and over again, in endless covert ways.
But we can change that scenario. We can learnto
mother ourselves.
What does that mean for Black women? It
means we must establish authority over our own
definition, provide an attentive concern and
expectation of growth which is the
beginning of
that acceptance we came to expect only from
our mothers. It means that I affirm my
own
worth by committing myself to my own
survival, in my own self and in the self of other
Black women. On the otherhand, it means

that as I learnmy worth and genuine
possibility, I
refuse to settle for anything less than a
rigorous pursuit of the possible in myself, at
the same
time making a distinction between what is
possible and what the outside world drives
me to
do in order to prove I am human. It
means being able to recognize my successes,
and to be
tender with myself, even when I fail.
We will begin to see each otheras we dare to
begin to see ourselves; we will begin to
see
ourselves as we begin to see each other,
without aggrandizement or dismissal or
recriminations, but with patience and understanding for
when we do not quitemake it, and
recognition and appreciation for when we do.
Mothering ourselves means learning to love
what we have given birth to by giving
definition to, learning how to be both kind and
demanding in the teeth of failure as well as in
the face of success, and not misnaming either.
When you come to respect the character of
the time you will not have to cover emptyness
with
pretense.*
We must recognize and nurture the creative
parts of each other without always
understanding what will be created.
As we fear each otherless and value each othermore,
we will come to value recognition
within each otherʼs eyes as well as within our
own, and seek a balance between thesevisions.

Mothering. Claiming somepower over who we choose
to be, and knowing that such power is
relative within the realities of our lives. Yet
knowing that only through the use of that power
can we effectively change those realities.
Mothering means the laying to rest of
what is weak,
timid, and damaged — without despisal — the
protection and support of what is useful for
survival and change, and our joint explorations of
the difference.
I recall a beautiful and intricate sculpture from
the courtof the Queen Mother of Benin,
entitled “The Power Of The Hand.” It depicts
the Queen Mother, her courtwomen, and her
warriors in a circular celebration of the human
power to achieve success in practical and
material ventures, the ability to make something
out of anything. In Dahomey, that power is
female.
VIII
Theorizing about self-worth is ineffective.
So is pretending. Women can die in agony
who
have livedwith blank and beautiful faces. I can
afford to look at myself directly, risk the
pain
of experiencing who I am not, and learn to
savor the sweetness of who I am. I can
make
friends with all the different pieces of me, liked
and disliked. Admit that I am kinder to

my
neighborʼs silly husband most days than I am to
myself. I can look into the mirror and learn
to love the stormy little Black girl who once longed
to be white or anything otherthan who
she was, sinceall she was ever allowed to be was
the sum of the colorof her skin and the
textures of her hair, the shade of her knees
and elbows, and those things were clearly
not
acceptable as human.
Learning to love ourselves as Black women goes
beyond a simplistic insistence that “Black
is beautiful.” It goes beyond and deeper than a
surface appreciation of Black beauty,
although
that is certainly a good beginning. But if
the quest to reclaim ourselves and each other
remains there, then we risk another superficial
measurement of self, one superimposed upon
the old one and almost as damaging,sinceit pauses
at the superficial. Certainly it is no more
empowering. And it is empowerment — our
strengthening in the service of ourselves and
each other, in the service of our work and future
— that will be the result of this pursuit.
I have to learn to love myself before I
can love you or accept your loving. You
have to
learnto love yourself before you can love me or
accept my loving. Know we are worthy of
touch before we can reach out for each other.
Not cover that sense of worthlessness with “I
donʼt want you” or “it doesnʼt matter” or “white

folks feel,Black folks DO.” And these
are
enormously difficult to accomplish in an
environment that consistently encourages
nonlove
and cover-up, an environment that warns us to be
quiet about our need of each other, by
defining our dissatisfactionsas unanswerable and our
necessities as unobtainable.
Untilnow, therehas been little that taught us how to be
kind to each other. To the rest of
the world, yes, but not to ourselves. There have
been few external examples of how to treat
another Black woman with kindness, deference,
tenderness or an appreciative smile in
passing, just because she IS; an understanding of
each otherʼs shortcomings because we have
been somewhere closeto that, ourselves. When last
did you compliment another sister, give
recognition to her specialness? We have to
consciously study how to be tender with each
otheruntil it becomes a habitbecause what was native
has been stolen from us, the love of
Black women for each other. But we can
practice being gentle with ourselves by being
gentle
with each other. We can practice being gentle
with each other by being gentle with
that
piece of ourselves that is hardest to hold,by
giving more to the brave bruised girlchild
within
each of us, by expecting a little less from her
gargantuan efforts to excel. We can love
her in

the light as well as in the darkness, quiether
frenzy toward perfection and encourage her
attentions toward fulfillment. Maybe then we will
come to appreciatemore how much she
has taught us, and how much she is doing to
keep this world revolving toward somelivable
future.
It would be ridiculous to believe that this process
is not lengthy and difficult. It is suicidal
to believe it is not possible. As we arm
ourselves with ourselves and each other, we can
stand
toe to toe inside that rigorous loving and begin
to speak the impossible — or what
has
always seemed like the impossible — to one
another. The first step toward genuine change.
Eventually, if we speak the truth to each other,
it will become unavoidable to ourselves.
* An abbreviated version of this essay was
published in Essence, vol. 14, no. 6 (October 1983).
I wish to thank the
following women without whose insights and
support I could not have completed this
paper: Andrea Canaan, Frances
Clayton, Michelle Cliff, Blanche Wiesen Cook,
Clare Coss, Yvonne Flowers, Gloria Joseph,
Adrienne Rich, Charlotte Sheedy,
Judy Simmons and Barbara Smith. This paper is
dedicated to the memory of Sheila Blackwell
Pinckney, 1953–1983.

** From a poem by Dr. Gloria Joseph.
*Unpublished paper by Samella Lewis.
* From “Letters from Black Feminists, 1972–
1978” by Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith in
Conditions: Four (1979).
* From The I Ching.
** From “Nigger” by Judy Dothard Simmons in
Decent Intentions (Blind Beggar Press,
P.O. Box 437, Williamsbridge
Station, Bronx, New York 10467, 1983).
* From The I Ching.
* This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe
Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen
Table: Women of Color Press, New York,
1984).
* From The I Ching.
* From “Every Woman Ever Loved A
Woman” by Bernice Johnson Reagon, song
performedby Sweet Honey in the Rock.
* From The I Ching.
Title PageCopyrightEye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and
Anger

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